"That’s when it occurred to me that the conventional wisdom about word-of-mouth was fundamentally wrong. Generally, people thought of word-of-mouth as the byproduct of a brilliant marketing campaign or as a reaction to some unexpected occurrence. The marketer generally thought of word-of-mouth as coming in a sequence: (A) Conduct brilliant marketing campaign. (B) Word-of-mouth will follow. But the experience of the car campaign, the TV spot, and all the stuff I had been listening to and thinking about made me realize that the traditional image was all wrong. It wasn’t that the marketing dog was wagging the tail of word-of-mouth. No, the great big bushy tail of word-of mouth was actually wagging the miniature poodle of marketing.

I thought to myself, word-of-mouth is this amazingly powerful force that everybody knows about but nobody really understands. It’s rarely caused by marketing. It’s not driven by marketing. Word-of-mouth is a fundamental human activity of immense depth and power. Marketing can only tap into it. Maybe.

That’s when I decided to become a word-of-mouth pilgrim. To set off on a journey of discovery. Just as some people set out in search of truth, adventure, or the perfectly frothy head on a glass of beer, I decided to try to understand the most powerful marketing force in the world: word-of-mouth."